Blizzard has posted a blog on the official Blizzard site talking more about the new Battle.net global friends list feature.
The post from Blizzard is a welcome to a new era of Battle.net and speaks about how with advanced internet connectivity over the past decade, they can now evolve the service for global and cross-platform experiences. The global friends list is their first step towards their new goal for the service and it looks like we can expect much more in the future.
Overwatch is going to be the first game to get updated features with cross-play being integrated allowing you to play with anyone, outside of China, on any platform that has Overwatch - PC, Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Although competitive games will not be cross-platform and instead of pools of PC players and console players, the rest of the game is open to party up. Because of this, Battle.net accounts will now be required for console players if they wish to play with friends on other platforms.
Although no plans have been announced yet for Hearthstone, we're hoping Blizzard at least uses this opportunity to merge our cross-region collections into one that can be used on any of the regional Hearthstone servers. This might not be the final form of a global Hearthstone though, we could see ranked ladders remaining regional for the purposes of esports, but the rest of the game arguably should be opened up so you can queue with your buddies on the other side of the pond into Battlegrounds or hit each other up for a friendly match. Again, Blizzard has not yet confirmed anything coming to Hearthstone, but we can certainly dream.
Blizzard goes on to say in their blog that they look forward to a future where we can play together regardless over where we are or what device we play on. This is certainly promising and, hell, its about time!
Quote From Blizzard We’re breaking down barriers.
We’ve always envisioned Battle.net as a place for players to connect, collaborate, and play their favorite games. Now, we’re realizing that dream on a truly global level.
“When Battle.net first came out, the purpose was to deliver a connected, multiplayer experience for a single title,” says Arron Goolsbey, VP of Platform Engineering for Battle.net. “Fast-forward 10 to 15 years, and Battle.net had evolved into a service that spanned all Blizzard games but was still constructed with the primary notion that players would mostly play with others within their region. The internet has come a long way in the last 10 years, enabling global and cross-platform experiences with high levels of quality. So now, Battle.net is evolving once again.”
Starting today, friends lists from different territories will be merged into one*, so you’ll no longer need to switch regions in Battle.net to talk to your buddies on the other side of the planet. “As Global Battle.net rolls out, players around the world will be able to come together all across the larger Blizzard ecosystem without any hurdles for the first time ever,” says Diana Hubbard, Platform Design Manager. In doing so, they will be able to effortlessly expand their friendships, groups, and communities—paving the way for forging new bonds over our present and future epic gaming experiences. This is just the first step, and it will only get better from here.” To accent this new era of global gaming and social connectivity on Battle.net, we’ve also updated our logo.
“We realized some time ago that our players would be better served by a global Battle.net that did away with the concept of regions,” says Jeff Allison, Lead Product Manager for Battle.net. “But breaking down these barriers was a significant engineering task. Now that we’ve done it, we look forward to a future where all Battle.net players can communicate and game together no matter where they are.”
Battle.net’s global updates also include cross-platform functionality. This has given our game developers the ability to let you play with others between PC and console seamlessly. Overwatch players will be the first to experience these new cross-play capabilities; for more information, check out this blog.
“You will be able to make friends anywhere as games published on Battle.net begin to utilize this evolved experience,” says Goolsbey. “We look forward to a future where billions of players worldwide can make friends and play together, regardless of where they are and what device they play on.”
These backend updates to Battle.net will also enable developers to build even more globally connected experiences for our players in the future, so stay tuned!
Quote From Blizzard Cross-Play is coming to Overwatch soon, allowing players to group up and play together. Powered by the latest global Battle.net update, players from around the world can team up, regardless of their preferred platform*. With the release of cross-play, all players will need to make a Battle.net account and link their appropriate console accounts. With the launch of Cross-Play, everyone who logs in to Overwatch by the end of 2021 will receive a Golden Loot Box to celebrate.
Comments
This is undoubtedly good news.
But I can foresee a few issues coming out of it. Call me a cynic, but whenever there's big changes like these there's always going to be something that breaks, and when cross region is involved, I wouldn't put it past that the disconnect problems just gets worse until we get the meme that is someone rising to legend on the backs of people skipping turns.
Also, there's the issue with multiple accounts on different regions. Granted that most people wouldn't have a 2nd account on another region, but if there's even a slight hint of combining collections being available how many new accounts will be opened solely to take advantage of this? If you start now, you can legitimately bank in at least 8k gold per expansion just completing quests. I can say with sincerity that I'd be tempted to do so myself.
Which is why I think this is likely only going to be restricted to playing cross borders with friends, while the rank plays stays within region. That will be taken by blizz as the reason not to combine the collections, no doubt saving their poor finance department the heartache.
That's not to say that it couldn't happen. So, let's have an honest discussion: how many of us will open a 2nd account on another region today (if you haven't already) just for that possibility?
For Hearthstone, there should've been one account for all servers from the beginning. Enough would be to put a small warning when switching servers that my gameplay experience might be ruined because of lag and that's it. If I still want to play with lag on another server, that's entirely my choice. Instead, when I try to switch servers I get a warning that my collection isn't traveling with me. And why not, may I ask? Because reasons...
I don't think it'll happen, but here's hoping to technicolor murloc Jesus that our collections will be merged. I made an EU account a couple years back with the sole purpose of getting most of the Murlocs golden, and I'm mostly there. Everything else is dusted. Mgrlrgle vibes only!
Also, I should become a logo designer. Take five minutes to choose a 'gamer' font and put a blue dot in the middle. Earn millions!
I think all they'll do for HS is letting you play with friends from other regions. Would make life for competitive players much easier.
So how likely is merging collections in the future?
If it's a sure thing, I should start earning gold now on all servers. I would then open as many guaranteed Legendaries (from the first 10 packs of an expansion) as I can on each server, and eventually gain them all in one collection. But if it won't happen, I don't want to spend my time earning cards I'll never use.
What should I do?
They commented on it a few years back. It's something they wish they'd done from the start but now it'd be a lot of work to merge them. Maybe the "new" team has the will and resources to tackle this
It's very unlikely for them to do that. That's gonna reduce their income from multi region card collections by 2/3.
I don't have real numbers here, but the number of folks buying packs on multiple servers is likely a tiny amount of the revenue pie. People do play on multiple servers, but we're talking the more hardcore audience of the game which is quite small, and only a subset of that is going to be buying packs.
Out of those people that play on multiple servers, many that I know will play F2P on their "second" account (horribly small sample size here) which means Blizzard ain't getting anything from them. Players who play on all 3 servers? Yeah, that's a crazy niche audience when we are talking about putting actual money toward card packs. The super hardcore.
Not everything is about money. The addition of rarity protection across all rarities certainly proves that. I now spend half the money on card packs since I no longer end up with 6 of the same epic card and 2 of the same legendary after pre-orders.
Blizzard is finally looking to escape the grasp of 1996, and sure, there may be a microscopic monetary loss by doing so, but having the entire community connected is worth more than the potential losses. Honestly, I could see them making more money once everything gets combined.
Look at Overwatch as an example. You and your friends play on PC but there's that one other friend or that guy from work that plays games on consoles. They know you play Overwatch on PC but there's no point in picking it up since you can't play together. Well, with cross-play, you can and that means more sales potential for folks in that situation. It is a little different for Hearthstone since we're talking about regions and not device types (the game has always been "cross-play") but there are definitely still situations where you've got internet friends in another region and maybe you don't play Hearthstone as often since you can't play together.
I can vouch for the massive pain in the ass it is to just get Battlegrounds games going within our staff. Some of us, not to name names, won't play on NA or won't play on EU (tutorials? why would I do those) so if we could all just play regardless of region, that'd be a tremendous boost to playing internally. It might not contribute to more spending for any of us, I know we're all fairly consistent in how we spend money in Hearthstone, but it would definitely increase Blizzard's engagement. Better engagement looks better for shareholders and overall should get more earnings, especially as more cosmetics become a thing across other modes.
Now that I think about it more thorough, I believe it's true. Most people that play multi-region must have a main account where they spent most, while the other account just for something else and F2P. I get it.
I guess the only thing left was for them to actually implement this and not mess it up, it is a huge one nonetheless. Too far too late? or it was impossible back then? I don't really know.
I don't think it would have been impossible to launch Hearthstone as one unified region, but it may have been easier for them to shard everything into their usual BNet regions. Looking back at when Naxx launched and other older expansions, when it went out in one region first instead of globally, it let them only disturb part of the audience when stuff lit up on fire.
I still remember the community complaints about how one region gets everything first and how it isn't fair. Meanwhile, the launch was horribly butchered and then when it launched in the second and third regions, everything was flawless since they knew what they were doing and had fixed issues so those players got a better experience overall, even if it did mean waiting.
World of Warcraft even sees this still with separate EU and NA launches for content. NA gets raids 24 hours before EU, which is so stupid from the competitive world-first point of view, but when there are issues with certain bosses, EU gets an opportunity to not encounter them. On a mental level, a guild struggling with a boss in NA that is clearly bugged can't be a great experience, which might give the EU folk a slight edge since they didn't have to deal with an unbeatable encounter for hours on end early on in progression. Still though, super unfair all around and it would be nice to have a level, global playing field. I hope that we'll see global raid launches in WoW now with the game potentially becoming regionless.
This is a pretty big change, and I think Bilzz would announce it a long time in advance.
Hopefully the size of the friends list is increased, otherwise someone like me with 200 friends on multiple servers would get a bunch of friends deleted!
So if the cross region play eventually hits Hearthstone, what happens to players who have cards on two servers? I personally have only ever really played NA, but dabbled a little on the EU server as a F2P person there. I might have a few cards on there that I don't have on my main account. So would they merge? Or perhaps Hearthstone will stay regionalized in their servers, especially since they have their entire Grandmasters league set up by server regions. Who knows! Can't wait to see what happens with that though.
get a pile of dust, probably.?
If you have an Archmage Antonidas on NA and on EU, you should end up with 2 copies of the card should collections get merged. Blizzard couldn't do this any other way because of people spending actual money on multiple servers. It is one thing to get something for free and then having the "two" copies just stay as one, but with money involved, you need to have the ability to dust those cards.
I'd love to see even ranked ladder go global though tbh. Having a single spot for a #1 legend and then figuring out different way of handling possible esports qualifications would be awesome. It would also be really neat to have a unified meta since sometimes you can see some variance between the regions, though not as much as China has seen compared to everywhere else.
I'm hoping we get announcements about Hearthstone globalfication on the run up to the next expansion. I'd also just take this Hearthstone year though so December or even right before Year of the x starts next April, that'd be cool too.
Aside from just having a (potentially) more interesting meta, for NA Wild players (and maybe EU too) it would increase the player pool significantly as we've already established before that players in the East tend to play more Wild than Standard.
Except that comment about Wild was more targeted toward China, which won't be a part of Global Battle.net because of the game being run by another provider there. While I don't doubt that effect may trickle out to other Eastern countries, just having more players in the collective pool should help things in the Wild zone.
I also expect that our entire collections (cards, dust and gold) will be merged eventually. However, to simplify things, I wouldn't be surprised if we were asked to designate a main account, with all the content of our other accounts converted in some way (dust, gold, or dust+gold) before being transferred to this main account.
There are a LOT of moving parts involved in implementing this change, though, so it might take a while before they're ready to deploy.
As for regional ladders, I think it makes the most sense to unify all the modes except Standard/Ranked... unless they also completely change the Grandmasters program. People are still getting used to the switch to YouTube, so I don't expect Blizzard will want to rock the boat anymore.
Which means it wouldn't hurt to progress on different servers to get some extra cards for that dust or just try and fill out your collection. Not sure if they'll transfer over gold, though.
They'd have to transfer gold over. If you earned it while on a paid Tavern Pass or from paid Arena tickets, that's definitely yours to keep! If they didn't the shit-show might be larger than the tavern pass itself.
But yeah, gaining some progression on other servers for the rewards, if one has the time to do so, is not a bad idea at all.